Search displays only root posts

I know this might have been dicsussed before, but can it be an option to only show the root post of a thread in search results so that you don't see x amount of results on the same results page that are within the same thread?

Now, what you see is the root post (mine) and then all others posts within the thread beneath it.

What I am asking for is an option to only display the root post, so that you know the search term is within that *thread* and then you go looking.

I would like to see this implemented because when there are a number of posts within the same thread referencing the same thing it clutters your search results. If this thread had 20 posts, then the 20 would of been displayed using the above link which is IMO, is rather useless as it's the same I will be opening - providing I'm browsing in flat mode, that is.

This would be another option, I suppose. Basically my initial thought was to supress listings in search results if the root post was listed. If the root post was down there, then I don't see the need for further posts within that thread to be listed. This is just a matter of personal preference.

I honestly don't see how this slows down the searching mechanism. Surely it just alters the way results are displayed?

And I take it all the data is exracted using XML so you can just parse the data as you wish, anyway? GT? ;-)

While it is true that the search itself would not be slower, the displaying might be considerably slower....What you would have to do, is for every post check if it is a root post, and if it is not check if the root post is also in the results.

Say you have 1000 results. For every one of the 1000 results, you would need to check 999 others if they are the root post of this one post. Multiply this. I don't know if the impact would be huge. But it might...

However, one problem that prevents itself is sorting the results. Consider this situation: you have two threads, each one of them has 10 posts. In the first thread, one post mentions "foobar" 2 times, but no other post in the thread has "foobar" in it. The second thread has one occurance of "foobar" in every post. Using the current sort code (but just stripping out duplicates) it results in the thread with two occurances of foobar coming up before the one with 10 occurances. To add a true thread search, it should order the results based on the number of occurances in a thread - not in any given post in the thread. Basically what it comes down to is that to do this, we have to first update the search module to know about grouped records. Jason Rhinelander Gossamer Threadsjason@gossamer-threads.com

Just a further idea: Once the root results were displayed, and you click on a root post, on the displayed page before-after the real post, you could place links to the post in the same thread, which also contained the searched word(s). Opinion?

Aha. That does present a problem. I guess this is further down on the to-do list as hacking the search module to do this would be a big job, and a shame if stability is compromised considering how good it is functioning at the moment.

The problem with this is that it wouldn't really be sufficient to just search root posts - and most forums don't offer this. The issue, instead, is that you need the ability to search a thread, rather than individual posts. This, however, is currently nor possible due to a limitation of our search driver. It's something I definitely want to address in version 2, with a new search driver, but it isn't something that I can deliver in this release. Jason Rhinelander Gossamer Threadsjason@gossamer-threads.com

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